WEEK
32
Don’t Fear the Reaper

Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.
— Deuteronomy 25:4

Weight: 205 pounds
Bread bookshelf weight: 44 pounds

“Wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat!”

I glanced at the numbers on the clock radio, glowing dimly in the dawn—5:30—pulled the pillow over my head, and tried to go back to sleep.

“Wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat!”

“Tell that damned bird to pipe down,” I moaned. Then I realized what its call—one I had never heard before—was saying.

“Wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat!”

I bolted upright. Today was harvest day!

The previous October, Anne and I had planted four beds of winter wheat. For nine long months I had waited for this day, watching over my crop like a nervous mother-to-be, rejoicing at its germination when the first sprouts cautiously peeked through the soil, missing it in its childhood when it disappeared under a blanket of snow, then celebrating its return in the spring. For nine long months I’d protected it against the neighbor’s cats, shooed away grasshoppers, and deterred greedy crows as it grew to maturity, turning from grassy green to bread-crust gold.

Growing winter wheat is a horticultural act of faith, if there ever was one. You’d think one ought to be able to grow a grain of wheat in less time than it takes to make a human baby, yet the gestation period is almost precisely the same. As is, remarkably, the number of chromosomes. Wheat contains one of the most complex genomic structures in the plant world, with forty-two chromosomes, only four fewer than humans.

The wheat had “died off” in the winter, going dormant. Then, in the first days of spring, despite looking deader than a bale of straw on a Halloween hayride, it had reawakened the very same week as its swanky suburban cousin ryegrass, and by late spring it had grown to a straight, strong, three-foot-high stalk.

Of grass, not grain. Even in May there was nothing to suggest that this stalk of grass might turn into something remotely edible. The wait for it to form seed heads and change from green to golden seemed endless. But three weeks ago, startling in its suddenness, it had almost magically become recognizable wheat. A week after that, the proud wheat heads bowed to the earth, each stalk curling over in a graceful arc, a biological mechanism that protects it from rain, for as the wheat approaches ripeness, a good soaking could cause it to sprout uselessly on the stalk rather than fall to the ground and sprout in the earth.

It was a touching gesture, the swollen, almost voluptuous seed head bending over to face the very earth it had sprung from, bowing as if offering its head in sacrifice to its master so that others might gain nourishment—and life.

I was only too happy to oblige. First I had to be sure it was ripe. I brought a seed head over to Erle Zuill, a local seventy-five-year-old farmer, for a look. The very first thing out of his mouth made my blood run cold.

“Are you sure this is wheat?”

He ran his fingers over the threads that were coming out of the seed head. “It looks more like barley. I’ve never seen threads like this on wheat.”

Oh my God! What had I done? My mind started racing. I was sure the packet had said wheat—wasn’t I?—but the seed company could’ve made a packing error.

“Of course, the last time I harvested wheat was fifty years ago,” Erle added. Erle or anyone else in the county, I thought. Later on, I would learn that some classes of wheat, including the soft red winter wheat that he might have planted back then, are “beardless,” lacking those long threads.

I relaxed a bit as he rubbed his aged, coarse farmer’s hands together vigorously, opened them, and blew. The chaff drifted away with his breath, leaving a small palmful of wheat berries, a little smaller than popcorn kernels, behind.

“It’s ripe for sure.”

That’s what I was waiting to hear.

Harvesting grain, the act that turned Homo sapiens from nomadic hunters and gatherers to village, then town, and finally city dwellers. Once our ancestors had learned to cultivate grain some ten thousand years ago, they could put down their own roots and stay in one place. And create pottery. And houses. And societies and schools and arts and writing and buildings. Thus in a sense the grain I was about to harvest was a direct and necessary antecedent to the magnificent Empire State Building, sixty miles to the south. As my knowledge of harvesting was based in whole on the same Flemish art that had filled my head when I planted the wheat, I had a similarly romantic vision of how the process would go. Stooped over, grabbing handfuls of wheat in my left hand, I’d swing the curved sickle in a graceful arc with my right, cleanly cutting the stalks off a few inches above the earth. The Good Wife would follow behind, gathering the wheat into sheaves, tying them, and laying them in the field, where the Happy Children, laughing and making a game of the work, would gather them up and bring them to the barn.

In my memory I’ll always believe I succeeded in living that painting, despite three facts: I didn’t own a sickle, there seemed no reason beyond art to bind the wheat into sheaves, and the children were both at their summer jobs.

One thing I got right: me stooped over. But with a tool no peasant in a Flemish woodcut would’ve been caught dead with. After taking a few useless swings with my old, rusty scythe (essentially a sickle on a long pole), I went into the basement and emerged with my not-quite-as-rusty hedge shears. For this small crop, they were ideal.

For a larger crop, we would’ve wanted to use a mechanical reaper, and some of us may remember from school the story of the McCormick reaper. Picture a crude robot—or automaton, as it would have been called back then—that took the form of a human, bending at the waist, swinging a scythe. This fanciful machine, which McCormick abandoned after fifteen years, was, not surprisingly, an abject failure, taking more rolls in the hay than the proverbial farmer’s daughter.

Huh? That’s not the story we learned in school. Cyrus McCormick a failure? His reaper an automaton? Of course not; I’m talking about his father, Robert McCormick. The kid said, “Pop, I think you’re taking the wrong approach to this,” and devised a horse-drawn device that looked nothing like a human but effectively cut and gathered the straw. Other reapers were appearing on the market at this time, just before the Civil War, but McCormick, with his business acumen and aggressive legal tactics (he once hired a small-town lawyer named Abe Lincoln), drove the competition out of business and went on to found International Harvester.

Back to our little crop, Anne (playing the Good Wife) and I moved down each row with our hedge shears, Anne gathering handfuls of stalks, which I snipped off a few inches above the ground, very much aware that I was harvesting wheat more in the style of a twenty-first-century Mexican landscaper than a fifteenth-century Flemish peasant, but after all, it was the twenty-first century. The whole operation took less than half an hour, and when we were done, we’d filled two large garden carts with wheat. Of course, most of that was straw and would be discarded.

The burning question the entire time was, how much edible wheat would this crop actually yield? I was hoping to get the equivalent of a five-pound bag of flour out of my 150-square-foot plot, but my minimum requirement was to get at least enough for one loaf of bread—that is, about a pound. Seeing how few wheat berries came out of the seed heads I’d sampled thus far, though, I was worried about getting even that much.

With the wheat stalks all laid out in the same direction, it was time to thresh. The word is closely related to thrash for good reason. Threshing consists basically of beating the hell out of the wheat until the berries are battered loose from the seed heads that encase and protect them. With some ten thousand years between the first cultivation of grain and the 1834 invention of the combine, mankind has, as you might expect, come up with a number of ways to accomplish this. Pliny the Elder, writing around 77 AD, described three methods in favor at the time: beating with a flail; using a crushing stone or board; and spreading the wheat out on a floor to be trampled by a train of oxen.

I had lent out my oxen for the weekend and didn’t own a flail—two heavy sticks connected by a short chain—which looks like something you’d find smacking the buttocks of a member of Parliament in a London S and M den, so I had to improvise, pulling out an old straw broom I’d been saving for the occasion. Anne and I laid a handful of wheat out on a new canvas tarp, and I threshed away.

The result of all my frenetic flailing was a bushel of dented wheat. Not a single berry emerged.

“Hit harder!” Anne urged, like a high school cheerleader rooting for her favorite (I hoped) linebacker. Cheered on by Pom-Pom Girl, I hit harder. A few strands of the broom flew off. The wheat bounced up and down on the tarp. I hit harder and still harder until, winded, I sat back on the tarp to catch my breath. A few lonely kernels of grain lay scattered among the debris. It was going to take something firmer than a broom to coax this stuff out.

“How about the back of a shovel?” Anne suggested.

That seemed a bit rough, but I didn’t have a better idea, so I flailed away at the wheat with a shovel for a few minutes. Sure enough, the canvas soon became littered with popcorn-size kernels of wheat. But an examination of the seed heads revealed that only about half the kernels were being released. We found that rubbing the battered seed heads in the palm of a hand or drawing them between thumb and forefinger released the remaining grains, but in a few minutes, our hands were raw from the coarse chaff, and we had to put on gardening gloves.

After a bit of this, with progress pitifully slow, I concluded, “This doesn’t make sense. What’s the point of all this flailing if we have to strip each seed head by hand anyway?” I went down to the workshop and returned with the wooden mallet I use on my woodworking chisels. Then, a handful of wheat held to the tarp with my left hand, I beat it with the mallet in my right. That was the ticket! Some wheat remained behind, but not nearly as much, and many heads were totally clean.

But after a half hour of beating the tarp-covered lawn with a mallet, the ground beneath had become soft and yielded to the blows, which in turn became less effective. I kept moving around to new, firmer spots, but even with a large tarp, they were becoming more and more difficult to find, and I was getting tired.

“You beat for a while,” I said to Anne, handing her the mallet while I went over to the woodpile, returning a few minutes later with my chopping block, a small tree stump that I use for splitting firewood.

Pounding on a firm surface caused the tough hull to release its grip on the berry with only a few blows—no additional stripping required. Now we were cooking. The job went much more efficiently if the seed heads were bundled together (guess there was a reason beyond art to gather the wheat into sheaves), so one of us bunched while the other pounded, and the tarp gradually filled with grain and chaff, along with broken pieces of straw.

Occasionally we stopped to shovel the wheat and chaff into a large bucket over which I’d placed a homemade sieve originally made for screening compost. Running our hands in the wheat and chaff along the screen, we were rewarded by the musical sound of grain tickling into the bucket. Most of the chaff fell in, too, but the sieve screened out the large pieces of straw and revealed seed heads that hadn’t been fully threshed.

After six hours, weary, sore, and sunburned, we had threshed our little crop of wheat, and I understood why the Latin word for the threshing board is tribulum, which has the same origin as tribulation. This was tribulation if I’d ever seen it. Thank goodness for the combine, which cuts, threshes, and cleans the wheat all at once, right in the field.

Our bucket of wheat and chaff was mainly (by volume, at least) chaff, and we still faced the job of winnowing, that often-cited act of “separating the wheat from the chaff.” But that would have to wait for another day. It was evening, and I needed a hot shower and a cold drink. Anne had one request as she peeled off her gloves and fell back onto the grass, exhausted.

“Promise me you won’t grow cotton next summer.”